Internet access, as well as access to digital content, is currently available. For example, consumers may request on-demand movies streamed from the Internet to one of their television sets in their local area network for viewing. Networks where such streaming audiovisual source contents are transported, however, are typically shared such that different source content types may be delivered via such shared networks. Data that gets delivered via this shared network may include various source content types, such as web page data, file transfer protocol (FTP) data, streaming audiovisual data, and other data, which may include control and signaling information. Furthermore, such a shared network may include varying technologies, such as Ethernet and Powerline Communication technologies. A consumer wishing to view streaming audiovisual or multimedia data, particularly movies, over a shared network is typically desirous of wanting the audiovisual data to be delivered with a certain level of quality so as to provide a decent viewing quality.
Audiovisual (AV) streams typically require quality of service (QoS) to provide a reasonable user experience. In some embodiments, some networks provide an auto-connect feature that automatically provides QoS to AV streams. One of the issues for an auto-connect feature within a system is the ability of the auto-connect module to reliably detect an AV stream that may require QoS. Typically, without specific information from the source or destination application, an auto-connect module, e.g., application and/or device, attempting to provide QoS to the one or more data streams in the network, has to detect the existence of the AV stream and also accordingly determine the QoS requirement(s) of that stream. Without this specific information, such as triggers or identifiers, directly from the application, the module configuring the QoS for the stream has to estimate the QoS needs of that stream. A good estimation is desirable considering that the quality of the estimation directly affects the user's experience when viewing the AV stream. Ways of providing quality of service to streaming data are thus highly desirable.